Back Issues: The John Birch Society

In this week’s issue, Sean Wilentz considers the rise of the radical right in today’s conservative movement. In “Confounding Fathers,” he addresses the influence of the John Birch Society on the Tea Party, as well as William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s role in successfully leading conservatives away from the Birchers’ influence in the sixties. In 1996, Buckley wrote a piece for The New Yorker about his friendships with several conservatives who served as members of a trust in Wichita, Kansas, from 1967 to 1977. In the article, Buckley discussed just how large a role the Birch Society had come to play in American conservative politics in the late fifties and early sixties:

Edgar Eisenhower [the President’s brother], sitting next to [former dean of Notre Dame Law School] Pat Manion, sipped his coffee and touched down on “right-wing crazies.” “Did you know, Dean Manion, that there’s a fellow up in the Boston area”—his chuckle was one part mirth, one part indignation—“who thinks that Ike is a Communist agent?”

Manion’s reaction was faultless: “You don’t mean it?” He managed utter astonishment, but he caught my wink, and winked back. There was indeed such a fellow up in the Boston area, his name was Robert Welch, he had founded the John Birch Society, and Dean Manion was even at that moment a member of the society’s national board.

Poor Pat. Like so many others, he had stayed on as a director of John Birch for no other reason than that he could not, as a matter of temperament, retreat under fire. He could never have given a moment’s serious notice to the lunatic conclusion of Robert Welch, which had been explained in a Birch publication given only discreet publication. [Barry] Goldwater looked on with pain. Two years before, he had signed a manifesto that I had written and published in National Review disavowing the society, but it had been difficult for him. For a season or two, in Phoenix in the early sixties, joining the John Birch Society was on the order of joining the local country club.

Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958, at a meeting with a small group of like-minded men in Indianapolis. A transcript of Welch’s presentation to the group was published as “The Blue Book” (1959), and it became the Society’s foundational document. The book warns against the threat of an imminent socialist tidal wave overtaking America. In 1961, A. J. Liebling reviewed the book for the magazine:

The disproportion between the magnitude of evil discovered everywhere and the insignificance of the remedies proposed makes Birchism a demonaic religion. The Birchist, like Man before the invention of fire, wanders helpless among malignant forces, his only consolation inner knowledge of how terrible things are, his only protection an amulet in the form of a “Blue Book,” his only weapon a postage stamp. His chiefest satisfaction is his conviction that his neighbor will perish, and that he will probably deserve to. “Communist” for the Birchist, the reader gathers after the first page or so of the book, means anybody who approves of paying taxes, national defense, public education, civil rights, the United Nations, labor unions, or poetry since Tennyson. There is no politician in whom Welch sees hope; even Barry Goldwater is a softhearted sap. And so it is true, for him, that there are “Communists” everywhere. Socialists, in the penumbra of the weird world Welch inhabits, are Communists; Roosevelt, and, save the mark, Woodrow Wilson strengthened central government, so were Socialists, so Communists. It is an ugly doctrine, which inhibits every effort to outperform our rivals, because implicit in it is the assurance that the effort will end in betrayal. Taken seriously, it could be more destructive than the nerve gas that all up-to-date chemical-warfare branches are now supposed to possess, which paralyzes the will to resist.

The entire articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.